A bad influence? Hardly that! Who could he possibly influence – in what way? – when the rest of the kids generally considered him a weed? A corruption, then, a taint which might somehow spread – like the proverbial rotten apple at the bottom of the barrel? Perhaps. And yet that simile didn’t exactly fit either. Or maybe, in a way, it did. For after all, it makes little difference that an apple can’t appreciate its own rottenness: the corruption spreads anyway. Or was that too strong? How could it even be possible that there was something, well, wrong with Harry Keogh, something of which even he was unaware or lacked understanding? Actually the whole thing was becoming distinctly ridiculous! And yet … what was it about Keogh which so worried Hannant?, What was in him, seeking a way out? And why did Hannant feel that when it finally emerged it would be terrible?
It was then that Hannant decided to investigate Keogh’s background, discover what he could of the boy’s past. Perhaps that was where the trouble lay. And then again, if maybe there was nothing at all and the whole affair was pi simply something spawned of Hannant’s own overactive imagination. It could be the heat, the fact that he was If sleeping badly, the unending, unrewarding, repetitious routine of the school – any or all of these things. It could ! 1 be – but why then did that inner voice keep insisting that Keogh was different? And why on occasion would he find Keogh staring at him with eyes which might well be those of his own dead and buried father . . .?
Ten days and two Tuesdays later, tragedy struck. It happened when the boys, PTI Graham Lane, and the Misses Dorothy Hartley and Gertrude Gower went off on their end-of-day stone-gathering trek to the beach. ‘Sergeant’, ostensibly to collect specimens of some rare wild flower, but more likely to impress his lady love, had climbed the beetling cliffs. When he had been more than half-way up the treacherous face of the cliff, projecting stones had given way under his feet, pitching him down to the boulder- and scree-clad beach below. He had tried to cling to the crumbling surface even as he fell, but then his feet had struck a narrow ledge, breaking it away, and he had been set spinning free in air. He had landed on his chest and face, crushing both and killing himself outright.
The affair was made more especially gruesome in light of the fact that ‘Sergeant’ and Dorothy Hartley, only the night before, had announced their engagement. They were to have been married in the spring. As it was, the following Friday saw ‘Sergeant’ buried. It would have been better for him, Hannant later remembered thinking, as he watched Lane’s coffin being lowered into a fresh plot of earth in the old cemetery, if he’d stayed in the Army and taken his chances there.
Afterwards, there had been sandwiches, cakes and coffee in the staff-room at the school, and a nip of something stronger for those who fancied it. And of course, Dorothy Hartley to console as best she could be consoled. So that none of the teachers had been there to see the grave filled in, or, after the gravedigger was through and the wreaths lay in position, the last lone mourner where he sat on a slab nearby, chin in the palms of his hands and lacklustre eyes staring from behind his spectacles, fastened mournfully – curiously? expectantly? – upon the mound.
Meanwhile, Howard Jamieson had not been remiss in seeking to get Harry Keogh a post-examination place at the Tech. in Hartlepool; or if not an actual place, at least the opportunity to win one for himself. The private examination – in the main an IQ test consisting of questions designed to measure verbal, numerical and spatial perception and aptitude – was to take place at the college in Hartlepool under the direct supervision of John (‘Jack’) Harmon, the headmaster. Wind of it had got out, however, along the Harden Boys’ School grapevine, and Harry had become something of a target for various jibes and japes.